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Do you like to kill animals? It is often, if not cliched, the little boy torturing animals and insects in a shed image of future serial killers we have ingrained in our minds. Of course, I am not like that, you say. There are some who would assert that the mere act of eating meat puts you into this category (ish). I eat meat. I also go through bouts of vegetarianism, veganism, raw-ism, fruitarianism, health fanaticism. Part of my soul is a dancing hippie, with long flowing hair, my peasant skirt full of puffs of air, and absolutely no top. Bare breasts in sun drenched mountain-top goodness. Yeah, man. But I eat that meat, sometimes. I love the bite of a fresh, pink steak, moist and flavor-bursting murder. It’s sick when you think of it. In the States I never come near the actual butchering of an animal. Doesn’t this make me worse? Not only am I eating (and often times unconsciously binging) upon a once living being, but I force the dirty work of killing the animal on to someone else, someone poorer, desperate for work, work that exposes him/her to the bacterias and physical dangers of the meat processing industry, but also, I imagine, the soul-scraping day to day reality of ending life. If I cannot push myself to do my own dirty work, do I have the right to enjoy my steak? I ask this question as if it were rhetorical, but it’s not a rhetorical question, in fact the answer is quite plain and obvious if you’d just admit that to yourself. No.

Here, it’s a bit better. Chickens roam around free to scratch where they please, until mama comes out and steps on it’s wing and chops its head off. It’s not forced fed, processed, or wrapped in plastic. But it is dead.

I have an image of myself, that does not match reality. There are times when I really get on a roll, and I am that healthy, hard working, giving soul, but then it all comes crashing down. I eat melted cheese, and roasted meat on sticks, fried chickens, fish… And you know what? It’s never as good as I imagine it to be.

The small minority of people who are able to stay in relationships for years on end are the ones who realize—or most likely just understand on an intuitive level—that they are shacked up with a fallible human. They are going to have many things about them that are unpleasant.

As I sat and contemplated all of this and the loss of my own father to a tragic suicide when I was only eight years old, I began to comprehend that I was (and still am) guilty of making unfavorable choices, especially